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I love this track… it brings back good memories for me. The Shetboy even re-encoded the videos off a Shadow single I’d bought, once (I think it was this and Mashin’ on the Motorway). Bless.

I guess it’s funny how different songs end up meaning different things to you, or how they make you think of your life when you were in a different head-space & place. And that everyone can name at least a few tracks that make them think of different times in their lives.

Music is truly awesome

P.S – The music is at a far higher sample rate (so sounds better) in the 480p version, but I’ve no idea how to force YouTube to play it that way by default, or at least I’ve read how (you just append &fmt=18 to the YouTube URL), it just doesn’t seem to work… You can enable a preference for HQ videos in your YouTube account settings (assuming you have one), but asides from that, it looks like you’re just going to have to click on 480p if you want the HQ version. Life is hard…

I’m running Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit, and thought I’d have a look at some old LucasArts gems today – but the version of ScummVM taken from the repos wouldn’t play any sound. So I fixed it.

• The all-in-one complete fix:
  Fire up synaptic and install libsdl1.2debian-pulseaudio then reboot. Sound (i.e. voice, samples etc) and midi should work absolutely fine now. A potential problem with this fix is that it means you have to uninstall libsdl1.2debian-alsa, which it’s possible you might want to keep. This is the route I finally took, but if I find a bunch of apps are now without sound, I’ll update the post and try to find some other methods.

Oh, and if you loose all sound after this (YouTube, Totem etc), then you’ve probably got gstreamer set to use ALSA, but have now removed the sdl-alsa lib, so just run gstreamer-properties and point your audio output to PulseAudio Sound Server then log out then back in. Fixed.

Update: Although working yesterday, I found I had no sound in flash stuff today (YouTube vids etc), so I installed padevchooser from synaptic, which dragged in a couple of other pulseaudio bits and pieces, launched padevchooser, and then from the icon in the system tray (top-right in Gnome) I just selected Default for Default Server and Default Sink – closed then re-opened firefox and everything’s working again. I guess I didn’t come across this yesterday because I already had Firefox open and using flash (npviewer.bin) with the ALSA plugin already resident in memory and in use.

• The easy fix to get midi working using ALSA:
  Try running ScummVM from the terminal as pasuspender scummvm – if you can hear midi sound when you start a game, that’s half the battle.
• The slightly more involved midi fix:
  If the easy fix doesn’t work, grab yourself a midi file from somewhere (like this one) and play it from the terminal with timidity name-of-file.mid. If it plays, jolly good. If not, have you got timidity installed? If you have, and still can’t play a midi, read this.

  I’ll assume you can play a basic midi file from the terminal, but there’s no midi in ScummVM games (which was the situation I was in). So, first we need to find out where our midi ports are at – to do this, run the following line from the terminal: aconnect -o -l

  The output I get is:

  client 14: 'Midi Through' [type=kernel]
      0 'Midi Through Port-0'
  client 128: 'TiMidity' [type=user]
      0 'TiMidity port 0 '
      1 'TiMidity port 1 '
      2 'TiMidity port 2 '
      3 'TiMidity port 3 '

  Midi in ScummVM wants to play on ports 17 or 65 by default, but on my box we can see that port 128 (i.e. client 128) is where the user-land midi ports are at. So now we need to modify the ScummVM config file with that data. So open up the file ~/.scummvmrc with your text editor of choice and add the line alsa_port=128:0 (or whatever your user-land aconnect -o -l output is), or if the line already exists just amend it to point at your midi port.

Give ScummVM another go (from the terminal so you can see its output), point the Music driver device at ALSA or Timidity now, and you should at least get midi sound, and see something like the following in the terminal output:

Connected to Alsa sequencer client [128:0]
ALSA client initialised [129:0]

Really though, I think the first option is the best, as I’ve not been able to get voice/samples working with anything other than installing the pulseaudio sdl library. I’ve just put the other options in incase you’ve a strong case against getting rid of libsdl1.2debian-alsa, and if I find there’s one in my case, I’ll come back and update things. But for now, I think I might have a crack at The Dig

I went to clone a USB hard-drive onto another last night, and because VirtualBox USB throughput is pretty slow, and there was a couple of hundred GB to copy, I booted into Windows to do it. So far, so good. Only at some point during the night Windows decided to install some petty IE fix or some shit, and then proceeded to restart my box. Mid-clone. It probably put up a 15 minute warning saying I’m going to reboot your box unless you stop me, and then without any further input just did it.

That is just some of the most wrong-headed thinking I can possibly imagine. It’s basically saying: I don’t give a shit about anything you’re doing. I don’t care if you haven’t saved your files or you’re in the middle of something. I’m just gonna reboot. Because I want to. And I’m in charge, not you.

You can fix this default, and frankly rage-inducing, behaviour as follows:

1.) Fire up the Group Policy Editor by going Start | Run | gpedit.msc

2.) Go to: Computer Configuration | Administrative Templates | Windows Components | Windows Update and modify the No auto-restart with logged on users for scheduled automatic updates installations to Enabled

3.) Reboot for it to take effect. (How ironic )

It should be noted that if you’re on a domain, domain-level settings can override group policy ones, and that after the restart window will still pop up after updating Windows – it’ll just never reboot the machine without user confirmation that it’s okay to do so.

Oh, and if you’re on Vista Home Edition, you don’t even get group policy tools in the first place, in which case you can get busy with the registry as per this article – or use the registry file they provide, or just use this Auto Reboot Remover tool.

Further food for thought here.

Ha! I’ve cracked it! This really shouldn’t have taken me as long as it did to get working, but now I can have pegs and balls of any size I fancy, and the collision detection works flawlessly. No more cheaky bodges to avoid double collisions, proper trig. offsets all the way… In fact, the only bodge left is adding a slight horizontal speed jitter to a ball if it ends up with a horizontal velocity of < 0.01 after a collision, because if it's bang over over the centre of the peg it'll stay there happily bouncing away until it comes to rest otherwise - which I think is fair enough.

So after all the additional hours, does it look any better? Nope… If anything it looks worse – but she’s my baby, and I’ve finally got ‘er working properly, so I don’t care!

Update: And by flawlessly, I mean that I’ve just noticed a very small ball going fast will go through a very small peg, because they never intersect… Drats! Guess I’ll have to check for ranged collisions (or increase the minimal ball/peg size, or limit the movement speed). Nothing’s ever easy, is it?